Ghost Child by Caroline Overington Page A

are treated when there’s a tragedy of some kind: she was being spoiled. She’d been offered a Happy Meal from McDonald’s and now she and the social worker were off to the Coke machine. She was being allowed to handle the change. Probably, she’d be allowed to feed the coin slot, choose her drink, press the buttons, and make the can fall. If she was anything like any other kid in the world, she would have been thinking, ‘Wait until I tell Jake. Oh wait, Jake’s gone. Do I want Coke, or something else?’
    In saying that, I don’t mean to imply that she was a callous child. Let me stress that, actually: I don’t believe for a minute that Lauren Cashman, or Cameron, or whatever she now calls herself, was a callous or uncaring child. In my experience, you can tell a six-year-old that their parent has died and they’ll go straight back to the TV, and look at it blankly. Ten minutes later, they’ll be giggling or fighting with a sibling over what to watch.
    It will come for them – the grief, I mean – but it takes years , not hours.
    Anyway, what happened in the corridor shocked usall. I was standing there, and Lauren was maybe two metres away, coming toward me. She was shaking the change in her hand, in step with the social worker, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, her mother was there. Now, let me assure you, that wasn’t supposed to happen. We were trying hard to keep them apart. They may well have been mother and daughter, and they may well have needed to be together right then, but the mum was linked to a serious crime, and there was no way we were going to let them collude, not once it became clear that the story was bogus.
    Anyway, for some reason they let Lisa out of the interview room at the same minute that Lauren was being escorted down the hall, and they ran right into each other.
    Now, in the twenty years since then, I’ve thought a lot about what should have happened in that moment. Had Lisa’s account been true – if Jacob truly had been set upon by a stranger – then mother and daughter would have run toward each other, surely? Lisa would have bolted down the hall and taken her surviving child in her arms, and they would have sobbed together, grieved together, held each other up. Lauren would have run to her mother, confused and afraid, and seeking comfort.
    What actually happened was the opposite. They stepped back . They looked startled to see each other. Lisa, in particular, got a fright. And then, get this, Lisa hissed . She raised her voice and said, ‘I hope you’re not telling any lies in there, Lauren.’
    Lauren didn’t bat an eyelid. In a voice just like her mother’s, a lazy, husky, adult drawl, she said, ‘I ain’t said nothin ’.’
    She was speaking the truth. Lauren hadn’t told us what happened on DeCastella Drive, not yet, anyway. Her mother hadn’t told us anything, either. And yet, the look they gave each other, it was like: Can I trust you?
    We didn’t know it, not then, but they had an agreement. How it was reached, I can’t tell you. Maybe, in the moments before the ambulance arrived, Lisa sat her little girl down and spoke to her calmly, saying, ‘This is what we are going to do …’
    Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe she took her by the shoulders and shook her until her eyes rattled and said, ‘If you so much as whisper a word about this …’
    I don’t know how it happened or even, really, whose idea it was. What I do know is that they entered into a pact, and sealed it, before any of us arrived. They concocted the story about the attack. They went over the details, as best they could, and as far as I can tell, they all agreed, ‘If we stick to this, nothing can happen to any of us.’
    It didn’t last, though. One of them reneged.

The Reverend John Ball, Anglican Priest
    I must admit I was surprised when the police told me that Jacob Cashman’s mother wanted to have the funeral for her young son at my church, St John’s Anglican Church, on the